Wednesday 25 October 2017
The Stories of Ruapekapeka is a documentary highlighting Northland's most infamous armed conflict.
The battle of Ruapekapeka, fought in January 1846, was the final engagement in the war that Britain lost, as James Belich famously described it. But whether that means Ngāpuhi won the Northern War that had begun nine months earlier is in some ways a moot point. After 1846 the Crown turned its back on the north, which was left to become a backwater as the rest of the New Zealand economy boomed. Arguably, it has never really recovered.
This documentary is hosted by RNZ's Māori Issues Correspondent Mihingarangi Forbes, and was made alongside Great Southern Television with funding from NZ on Air.